Report from the Road:
The Truman Library and Museum – Independence, MO
By Doug McNair
December 2007

After running the 119694_avalanche Press dealer booth at this year’s Command Con in St. Louis, it was time for my wife Paula and I to take a badly-needed vacation. My idea of a good vacation is a long roadtrip punctuated by stops at historical sites and museums, so after a quick visit to the Louis and Clark Boathouse in St. Charles, MO (near the spot where the Corps of Discovery set off for Terra Incognita), we headed west to Kansas City. Our first stop there was the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, MO.

The entrance hall is graced by a beautiful (if fanciful) mural giving the artist’s impressions of the “opening” of the American West:

And behind that is a full-scale reproduction of the Oval Office as it looked when Harry Truman was President (unfortunately the lighting there was too dim to give a decent picture without a flash, which the museum prohibits). A movie theater gives a 45-minute documentary on Truman’s service in wartime and politics, and then down a stairway the exhibits covering Truman’s life begin. This is where things get interesting for the military history buff. One display covers Truman’s service in World War I as an artillery captain:

and features a summary of his service in the war, period equipment issued to American artillery officers in the field, and the French 75mm gun and caisson of the type he and his unit manned (my apologies for the blurriness – lack of flash makes these pix less than optimal):

Subsequent exhibits cover Truman’s years in the US Senate, where he presided over a commission charged with rooting out corruption and waste in the issuing and execution of defense contracts in World War II (something we could have used from the getgo in Iraq):

Then the exhibit moves on to Truman’s prosecution of the end phase of the war:

And culminates in my favorite part of the whole museum, the multimedia exhibit dealing with Truman’s decision to drop the Bomb on Japan. A wall of TV screens shows war footage from the Pacific and anti-Japanese propaganda from the period, while the audio plays the voiced opinions of both supporters and opponents of Truman’s decision from then and now.

And then on the opposite wall, museum visitors get to write-down their own opinions and add them to the ongoing discussion:

For those who can’t make out my already-bad writing in the dark, I wrote:

“It was the right thing to do. To say that use of the Bomb was unjustified due to the massive civilian casualties it caused is to ignore the fact that civilians are ALWAYS the primary victims of every war. Had the US Armed Forces invaded Japan, far more Japanese civilians would have died than those killed by the Bomb.”

One can only hope that in this era of “controlling the message,” current and future Presidents will be as principled and courageous as Harry Truman was in inviting the public to come to his Library and freely record their opinions, positive and negative, about the most controversial act of his presidency.

The exhibits wind-up by covering the social and economic dislocation that occurred as the US transitioned back to a peacetime economy:

And then a long, dark corridor leads the visitor into an impressive exhibit on the Berlin Airlift and the beginnings of the Cold War. Truman’s re-election campaign happened on the cusp of the debate about whether to fight for Eastern Europe, and Truman’s front-line experience in World War I leant power to his argument that a rush to war should be avoided by every possible means:

Our Iron Curtain module illustrates quite powerfully that Truman was right, since the American armor of 1948 was nowhere near up to the task of taking-on the Soviet battle tanks that crushed the Nazi war machine.

Back up the stairs, the visitor gets to walk through the courtyard that contains the gravesites of Harry and Bess Truman. Just off the courtyard is a glass-enclosed foyer that lists the many policy initiatives, which Truman was first to champion and which are still major issues today; among them civil rights, universal health care and the role of the US in the world at large.

The exhibits end with Truman’s retirement years as a fixture of the community in Independence, including his daily morning walks at a military pace of 120 strides per minute which left several much-younger reporters breathless by the side of the road before their interviews were over. Overall, the Truman Library and Museum is a vital asset to the continuing study and debate over one of the most momentous eras in US history, and a very well-presented memorial to the life of an extraordinary American.